Saturday 26 March 2011 20.05 EDT
First published on Saturday 26 March 2011 20.05 EDT

Endearingly combustible as ever, former Amstrad boss Lord Sugar has worked himself up into a right old lather over George Osborne's budget. His beef? The chancellor's new tax on passengers carried in private jets. A "window-dressing publicity stunt," splutters Sugar, who says the proceeds will barely add up to a row of beans.

"An owner of a private jet has paid for it themselves out of tax-paid income," says the Apprentice star. "They also employ staff like pilots and engineers to maintain their aircraft; again out of tax-paid income."

Musing over what injustice could be levied by the Treasury next, Sugar wonders whether Osborne could go an extra mile by creating a tax paid by Rolls-Royce or Range Rover owners on every passenger that they carry in their cars.

Sugar's point is not entirely unreasonable – imposing air passenger duty on private planes will amount to peanuts and is totemistic, rather than revenue-raising. It won't serve any particular green purpose because the people involved are generally too wealthy to be deterred from VIP journeys by a few quid in tax. But the Amstrad man is onto a loser. Nobody is going to go on a march to support private jet owners. The same goes for all of the other victims cunningly singled out by Osborne in a surprisingly populist budget.

Let's have a quick roll call of the losers. There were non-doms, who will face a slightly higher annual fee for the privilege of being resident in the UK while paying tax abroad. Banks, deep in the mire of public opinion, are being clobbered (very gently) with a higher levy so that they don't benefit from a cut in broader corporation tax. And then there are oil companies, hardly the cuddliest of enterprises, which are being milked for a £2bn windfall tax to pay for a 1p-a-litre drop in petrol duty. Exploration firms active in the North Sea aren't happy.

"This was an absolute shock – it was announced so suddenly, with absolutely no consultation," said one oil industry source, who argues that 440,000 jobs are supported by North Sea oil, which still has plenty of mileage to go; some 40bn barrels of oil have been extracted from the ocean over the last four decades but 24bn barrels are thought to remain up for grabs. Frankly, though, they can afford it.

To round off this curious club of Osborne's enemies, the Channel Islands are furious, in a very polite way, about plans to close a loophole allowing shoppers to avoid VAT by purchasing CDs and DVDs through offshore warehouses. Alan Maclean, Jersey's minister for economic development, complains that 1,000 people on his island work in e-commerce and that they're in a totally legit business: "These are Jersey companies employing Jersey people with their stock owned here in Jersey."

You've got to hand it to Osborne. He's succeeded in isolating targets in the budget who will command next to nothing in terms of popular support. Let's hear it for non-doms, oil industry executives, bankers, private jet owners and Channel Islanders! Silence? What a surprise.

It's an oddly un-Conservative strategy – you wouldn't have caught Nigel Lawson taxing the owners of private jets. They're rich and they're highly likely to vote Tory. Plus, a classic Thatcherite would have applauded the "freedom" of individuals who jet themselves around the nation rather than putting untoward strain on roads and railways.

But it's clever politics and rather impressive opportunism. Because with the exception of the windfall levy on oil companies, none of these groups of "victims" will contribute enough through Osborne's various crackdowns to create an even modest wrinkle in the public finances' bottom line. They're in there to divert attention from an otherwise low-action budget, which risked being memorable only for the miserable growth figures Osborne was obliged to read out from the Office for Budget Responsibility: an anaemic 1.7% rise in GDP this year, then 2.5% in 2012 – revised downwards from 2.1% and 2.6% respectively.

For all the government's blather about entrepreneurship, enterprise and philanthropy, the truth is that we're in for a long, slow slog before Osborne's promised "march of the makers" hoves into sight to manufacture us back to a generation of prosperity. And a half-hearted swipe at private pilots, bankers and non-doms isn't going to make the slightest difference.